The Armageddon virus: Why experts fear a disease that leaps from animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years

The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting.

As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least 30 per cent of cases, Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal.

And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan, became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital.

It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species barrier to infect humans with deadly effect.

But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country for the first time.